1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to software monitoring, tracking, and return on investment (ROI) analysis.
2. Description of the Related Art
Powerful trends are reshaping the way the software industry operates and the way software is being developed. The biggest trend is arguably the one toward running Information Technology (IT) as a business. The United States Department of Commerce estimates that 50% of all capital spending is spent on IT and software. According to published studies, a not-insignificant portion of this spending is wasted because of the lack of metrics regarding productivity and ROI, and because during the software development process developers lack the ability to gather feedback easily from users and customers. Without such feedback, developers and product managers cannot determine which features of an application are most popular, which features cause the most problems when the software is used, and the like. Decisions about where to optimally allocate and leverage development resources thus are uninformed. The problem is exacerbated as software development and testing activities become distributed around the world. In the past, developers and IT managers have attempted to ascertain and evaluate application usage information through various techniques including guess-estimation, user surveys and focus groups, but such techniques typically represent only a small sampling of a customer base, and they often contain inaccurate and untimely data.
It is known in the prior art to provide methods and systems for centrally coordinating, collecting and storing error, trace, audit and other information in a computer network. A representative example is U.S. Pat. No. 6,470,388, issued to Niemi et al. In this patent, selected applications or processes running at various entities or hosts within the network instantiate one or more “debug” objects that collect given information. Each entity also includes at least one logging service layer that communicates with the application or process, and includes a communications resource and one or more state machine engines. In response to collecting error, trace, audit or other information, each debug object passes that data to the respective logging service layer, which decides whether to forward the data to a centralized logging facility disposed within the network. The forwarding of collected information depends on the state of the debug object. At the centralized logging facility, the information is time-stamped and appended to a log file along with the application's name and the name of the entity or host at which the application is running.
Another representative patent is U.S. Pat. No. 6,591,228, issued to Hall et al. In this patent, a logging service logs to a centralized log diagnostic messages from applications executing in a computing environment in which a plurality of mainframes are coupled to data storage area. Each mainframe has one or more subsystems that execute applications. A logging service API writes diagnostic messages to the data storage and, depending on the type of problem, contacts an alert facility.
While the above-described application logging techniques are generally useful, they work across homogeneous computer environments, using a relatively modest number of tracked systems, and they collect a relatively constrained set of information. There remains a need in the art to provide methods and systems that track application usage information independent of platform, location and number of deployed application instances, especially in the context of the software development process.
The present invention addresses the need in the art.